Thursday, March 31, 2016

Next game project

(seriously, I figured I'd say this
before someone thinks this is an april fools joke again <-- it
happened several times already that someone thought this)

It's not even 1st april yet.

(at least not over here)

Anyway, let's get started:

First of all, please let me explain a
couple things, so you all understand why we decided on doing this.

As I mentioned a couple times in the
past, we're financing game development via Patreon.

The first 600 $ go into the webcomic,
while everything on top of that is being invested into developing
hentai games. The past months this amount was around
100-200 $, recently it climbed up to 200-300 $ per month. This allows us to work on games about
2-3 days per month.

(btw. this only covers Cres' artworks,
everyone else is not getting paid (which means yes, I'm also working
for free))

At any rate, with just 2-3 days per
month there is not much progress to make on games like DA
(Deathblight Apocalypse) or games like Paperheads 2. If we would go and try making those
games right here, right now, we might very well need 2-5 years to
finish one of them.

This leads us to the following
conclusion:

We need to do a game which is less work
(graphic wise) than any of those previously named games, so we can
make noteable progress with our current funding level.

And this is where RPG Maker comes to
mind.

RPG Maker has lots of "premade"
assets, while Cres can play out her strengths and do character
graphics as well as CG's. She doesn't need to spend time on the
tileset, sprite animations or other things, which saves us a
looooooot of time. Also we can tell another story about
our Deathblight characters, which is also one of our strengths.

(furthermore, it's quite easy to add a
lot of characters in this kind of game)

More precisely:

We want to do an RPG Maker game with a
similar battle mechanic like Ahriman's "The moral sword of
Asagi".

In case you haven't heard of it yet,
you can find the english link (the game's still japanese though)
here:

We asked Ahriman for permission to use
his code and scripts, and he kindly granted us permission to do so.

Thank you very much Ahriman!

This makes it easier for us to work
with RPG Maker, as this is our first RPG Maker project.

So we can focus on the graphics,
characters and story.

Compared to DA and Paperheads, this
project would be more fit to being a Patreon game anyway.

This is because of several reasons:

- Faster progress is possible even with
low funding

(this allows us to do more updates in a
shorter time, compared with DA or Paperheads)

- We could do votes on Patreon, and ask
people what we should include next

(a platformer might run into gameplay
issues if people vote on flying enemies only, for example, but in an
RPG Maker game it really doesn't matter that much how the enemy looks
or what type of enemy it is, it shouldn't break the gameplay, so we
can give more control over choosing the enemies to our Patrons)

- If people wish for it, we can include
more and more characters, and expand the game a lot.

(this might even go as far as nearly
infinite expansions, or multiple sequels, if that's what everyone
desires)

Also, if Patreon funding reaches a
certain amount, we could hire a dedicated pixel artist.

This would allow us to finally work on
games like DA or Paperheads 2, while being able to finish those games
in a timely manner. This also means, that we would be able
to still work on the RPG Maker game (if enough Patrons wish for this)
while simultaneously working on DA or Paperheads 2, as we would have
more working-power in the case we are able to hire a dedicated pixel
artist.

We talked to our Patrons about this,
and held a survey regarding this matter, you can see the survey
results here:

The game will take place in modern
times (cell phones, cars etc.) and will focus on our characters from
Deathblight taking on missions to clear out several demon-dens in a
city. At first there will be only Ferania and
Minori in the game, but we'll expand the cast as we move on.

(first we'll add Catheline and probably
even Aurora, since we believe those two add a lot to the dialogues
and plot, but afterwards we let the Patrons decide via polls/votes on
who to include into the game next)

The combat mechanic will be very
similar to Asagi's.

Which means, the battle system will
contain hentai and the characters can be captured and need to be
rescued.

We also think about including a
corruption mechanic.

And various "jobs" the
characters can take on to earn some money.

(this means stuff like prostitution or
working in a maid café or a bar etc.)

Some jobs require a bit of corruption,
or the character will refuse to do it.

There will also be hidden events, when
you take a character on a mission which has a higher or lower
corruption value, something good or bad might happen to that
character.

And yes, there will be potions to raise
or even cure corruption.

(even completely remove corruption!)

Which gives more freedom to the players
actions.

I'll post more details along the way.

Here you can see some concept art for Ferania and Minori:

(they're still the same characters, just with different clothing)

Ferania clothing concept art

Minori clothing concept art

Also another change we decided to do
is, that we're going to create free hentai games from now on.

(this doesn't affect Visual Novels or
if we decide on doing "non hentai" games one day)

By "free" we mean, that we're
using Patreon as financing method to make those games possible.

Ultimately, anyone (even non Patrons)
will get access to the games sooner or later.

But Patrons will get access to the
newest version of those games.
(also Patrons get to vote on the contents of the game, and thus influence development)

Everyone else needs to wait until the
next Patreon version goes online, before they get the last version.

Which means, Patreon Supporters will
always get the newest version, everyone else 1 version older than the
newest version.

For example, if the version 0.2.1 goes
online on Patreon, the 0.2.0 version will be online on the blog for
everyone. If version 0.2.2 goes online on
Patreon, version 0.2.1 will go online on the blog for the general
public.

With this change, we'll also be making
a couple changes to our Patreon campaign in the near future.

23 comments:

Im glad to hear that, even more i glad that you decide to use a Ahriman's game mechanics, maybe when you got more steady&bigger cashflow, you can even think about a "NewFace"-author "Evil Goddess" game mechanics.

In case if you don't know about that game - here his blog(abandoned since march 2014)http://newface99.blogspot.ru/

Technically it inst abandoned. the writer has been updating it. you can find the guy at ulmf forum. though to get the latest version i.e.. 1.08 you need to be a backer. but 1.04 is still available for public.... maybe. though I love the idea and look forward to it.

I liked Moral Sword of Asagi and there's guy who's translating it now, currently 60% of the game is translated btw.So it's really intriguing to see what you guys will do. (In hopes to see my BDSM fetishes in game :D )

Thank you very much for the offer!We all bought RPG Maker VX Ace about a year ago when it was on sale, so don't worry.(even our composer and other team members have it, so there really is no need! Thank you very much for your kindness!)